Will's Birth Story

Will's Birth Story - Six Months Later!

Just like with his sister, Will's due date came and went with not so much as a contraction.  I had never felt a naturally occuring contraction and couldn't really remember the pitocin-induced ones that I had with Amelia.  However, I was awakened one Tuesday morning five days after I was due with some pains that seemed to be coming and going.  I started timing them with my phone contraction timer, but around six in the morning, they subsided altogether.  

Nevertheless, when I woke up that morning, I called my mom to tell her that I had been having SOME kind of contractions.  She left work early to stay with Amelia and me.  The contractions picked up again, but they were short and far apart for most of the day.  Mid afternoon, my mom went home for a bit, but promised to come back when I needed her.  

Around dinner time/ Josh coming home time the contractions really picked up, but I knew I had to wait for the 5 minutes apart, lasting a minute, for an hour.  They weren't anything  that close together or long.  Josh came home late because (get this) he stopped at the hardware store to pick up shelves for my craft room closet (my second-favorite decision of the day).  

After dinner, the pain was getting a bit unbearable, but the contractions were like 10 minutes apart and I could still walk and talk through them.  Still, I decided to call the midwife and alert her that I was in labor.  Being my second baby and because I had had off-and-on contractions all day, she decided that I should come in (my favorite decision of the day).  

Josh hadn't packed a thing, so he was throwing clothes and toiletries in bags while I was being mean and in pain and we waited for my parents to come take our baby girl.  

While in the car, my contractions jumped from 10 minutes apart to 3 minutes apart.  We never even came close to the 5-1-1 guideline.   Thank GOODNESS the midwife had me come in anyway!  Josh decided that this was a great time to drive 95 miles an hour down the highway because he "didn't get this experience with Amelia."  

We arrived at the hospital around eight or eight-thirty.  In triage, they called my midwife (who was at the hospital anyway) to check me and I was already seven cm.  I had expected, mmm, four, maybe five.  She was pretty shocked as well, since I was still pretty functional.  I was very much looking forward to the epidural, so they rushed me up to delivery so I could get that in a hurry. 

However, the anesthesiologist had just been rushed into a c-section and they were very doubtful that she was going to make it in time for me.   Grrrreat.  I know there are lots of stalwart drug-free laborers out there.  To quote Elphaba, "I'm not that girl."  

Not happy

They prepped me anyway, just in case, and the midwife offered to break my water so that I could have a quicker drug-free delivery.  No thanks!  With Amelia, I never got to the "Wow, this really really really hurts" portion of labor because I was induced and was always in control of my pain.  I got the epi at 4.5cm with her.  With Will, I most certainly got to the, "Wow, this really really really hurts" portion and I did NOT want to experience something called the "Ring of Fire" while still feeling my lower half.

Happppyyyyyy

 Miraculously, the anesthesiologist DID make it in time to give me my epi and I was completely happy and pleasant after that.  The midwife broke my water (she asked me if I wanted him born that day, or the next and I chose that day because the next day was an ugly prime number and I hate prime numbers), I was fully dilated, and they got me set up to push.  Ten minutes later, a little before midnight, Will was born.  He was tiny - almost a pound smaller than his sister absolutely miraculous!   

 

Nursing went MUCH better with him.  It wasn't without its complications, but, overall, it was a much easier experience!  

My Name is Will

Hello Everyone!  My name is Will and I turned six months old today.  My Mommy hasn't blogged in a long time.  That's because I don't let her sleep.  In fact, I slept through the night for the very first time last night!  Why sleep when the world is so new and fun??

 My sister is kind of crazy.  She's two and she's good at it.  She likes changing her mind and making messes.  I can't wait until I'm two!  My Mommy also hasn't blogged in a while because my sister is so crazy and my Mommy spends all her time on Pinterest trying to pin activities that will keep my sister's brain and hands occupied.

 This is my family when we had a blizzard.  Brrrrr.  I hated the snowsuit.  I hated the hat.  I hated the boots.  I like to cuddle and be cozy.  Who needs snow?  That's my dog, Levi.  Remember him?

My Mommy promises she will blog again.  We have a new house (well, I don't, I've always lived here) and my Mommy has some fun projects going on.  She'll be back with some fun posts/updates/my birth story, etc.

Bye for now! 

Dear Amelia

Dear Amelia,

Yesterday, I read you 1,714 books.  Actually, it wasn't 1,714 different books.  It was about seven different books that added up to 1,714 times.  And most of the books weren't stories.  They were books of pictures that either you or I pointed to and I said the name.  So I couldn't even act it out or sing it or assign new voices. Every time you handed me a book, you climbed your chubby body into my lap and snuggled in to listen to the most fascinating book in the world to you.

By the end of the day, I felt like I couldn't read (if you call it that) ONE MORE BOOK.

But then I thought -

There's going to be a day where I'd give anything for you to snuggle your body into my lap to listen to a book.

And there are moms out there who would do anything to get the opportunity to read their child one more book.

And there are people out there who would do anything to have a child to read a book to.

And I was humbled.  And I would love to read you My First Word Board Book as many times as you want (and even more!).

For the curious, this frilly dress girl is reading a Red Sox board book.  :D

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to my wonderful husband

I can't imagine Amelia having a better daddy!

  Happy Father's Day to my dad, my Pop, my Grampy, Josh's dad, and Josh's stepdad as well!  We are full of Fathers here!

Celebrating Mothers - Mom

Welcome to Celebrating Mothers - Day Five

Today is my final tribute post (although I still have a post planned for tomorrow) and it is about my mom.

Beth

Beth was born in Texas, and lived in Massachusetts, California,and Virginia among other places. She had her tonsils out in Africa while living in Turkey. As an air force brat, she moved - alot. She was always skinny and her thick brown hair was always short. She has one slightly older brother and she was often mistaken for his twin. She liked to talk. She moved back to Rhode Island permanently just as she started high school (as an aside, she lives in Massachusetts now, but she still thinks she lives in Rhode Island).

My mom and dad met at work. She was 19 when they married and they had me a little over a year later when she was 20. My brother came two years after that. My parents just celebrated their 31st wedding anniversary.

There's about a million adjectives that describe my mom: kind, generous, sacrificial, sympathetic, giving, friendly, creative, artistic, selfless, hard-working, and on and on and on. I can think of a hundred instances where she dropped what she was doing to help me finish a project or paper or to take me some place I needed to go. She made my baby food and sewed my clothes. She was one of my Girl Scout leaders and baseball coaches. She drove me to ballet lessons and went to every tennis match. She was always supportive, always willing, always cheering.

She's an incredibly talented person. She makes beautiful cakes (many I've shared on this blog) and has a certificate in decorative painting. She paints furniture and murals. She sews, knits, scrapbooks, etc. (Sound familiar? Yeah, she gave me her crafting ADD)
More importantly, she's an incredible kind person. She has a soft heart, especially for those on the outside. She has a tendency to befriend those who are new, different, or lonely. Currently, she volunteers with women who are overcoming addictions. My mom doesn't judge or mock.  She empathizes and encourages. 

My mom loves her family - her in laws, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, husband, children, and dog.  She's always making someone a cake or going to a recital or graduation.  Everyone loves her back as well.  When I was in Girl Scouts, many girls told me I was lucky, and that they wished she was their mom.  I couldn't agree more.  If she wasn't my mom, I would want her to be! 

She brought my brother and me to church every week.  She made sure that we were in a great youth group and that we were raised to be godly people.  She set a great example for us both as a church going Christian and a person who lives out Christianity in every way, every day.

My mom gave me lots of ummmmm.....interesting....qualities of hers.  For example, you can find both of us up to our eyeballs in craft projects the night before a major event (holiday, party, wedding, etc.).  She also gave me the talent of procrastination - she bought a book on procrastination and never read it.  And there was that book on organizing your life that got lost in a pile of papers. Both of us have a hard time being realistic about time and how many projects can actually be accomplished in a limited amount of time and both of us looooove bonus projects that don't make any sense! 

My mom loves people, loves adventure, loves color, loves travel, loves dogs, loves cooking, loves Lifetime movies, loves learning, loves God, loves memories, and loves me.  I love her back.  She's my best friend and the best mom in the world (sorry, but it's true).  If I'm half as good a mom as she is, I will be very happy!
 I love you, Mom!

If you'd like to celebrate a woman in your life, please blog about it and add your blog link to the MckLinky below!

Celebrating Mothers - Mother-in-Law

Welcome to Day Four of Celebrating Mothers. Today's subject is my mother-in-law, Joan.

Joan

Joan is one of six children who lived in Rhode Island most of her life. She was a single mother to my husband and made many sacrifices to make him the priority. She was blessed with a beautiful voice and always was ready to sing in her church. She loves the Lord with all her heart and has a close relationship with Him.

Later, after my husband was grown, she married a loving man named Fred and they moved off to Virginia. I'm sure it was difficult for my mother-in-law and her only son to be separated, but God was in control of everything. I met and married Josh years later and after the wedding they decided to move back to New England. That still took some time, but now they live in a beautiful house in New Hampshire.

Although I had met my future mother-in-law when I was young, it wasn't until I re-met my husband that I really got to know my mother-in-law. She is a deep and spiritual woman with a very giving personality. All those years of prioritizing and relying on God to provide her needs has turned her into a person who understands what is important and what is not. She's not the classic witchy mother-in-law. Not even close!! She loves volunteering in her church in outreach programs, whether it is putting together witnessing packets to help teen girls or pumping gas, she is happiest when she is giving back. She makes beautiful stamped cards and belongs to a program that sends them to soldiers so that the soldiers can write home to their loved ones.
Joan is spontaneous, very funny and an out-of-the-box thinker. She finally has someone to share girly things with (me!) after only having a son, then a husband.  She loves her large extended family and always lends a supportive and listening ear when someone has a problem.

I'm so thankful to her for raising my wonderful, caring, hard-working, giving husband.  Their life was not particularly easy or traditional, but I can see that some of Josh's best qualities came out of some of the trials that he faced.  He loves his mom in a special way  because it was the two of them for so long.  My mother-in-law is wonderful and I look forward to getting to know her even better as the years go by!

If you would like to join in, please add your link to the list below!

Celebrating Mothers - Grandmother

Welcome to Day Two of Celebrating Mothers week!  If you'd like to join in, you don't have to follow my schedule.  You can honor any woman you want at any point this week!

Today, I'm going to celebrate the life of my father's mother, Pauline.  To me, she's Grammy.

 Pauline
I am blessed to have all four of my grandparents still alive.  This is a picture of my Grammy and Grampy's wedding day in 1950.  That means in September, they will be celebrating their 60th year of marriage!  They had four sons (my dad being the second) before they had their daughter (who was a "later in life" baby).  My Grammy knew how to handle her four crazy sons (a wooden spoon was often involved).  She also got to spoil my aunt after those four sons were grown.
Grammy's nine grandchildren range in age from 32 years (and married with 2 kids of his own) down to 4 months!  Four of her grandchildren are married and she also has several great-grandchildren.  She now gets to cherish her second wave of grandchildren - my aunt's four-year-old, two-year-old, and 4-month-old children along with her various great-grandchildren.

 This picture is me at age three or four with Grammy.  It's clear to see where my hair color came from!  Grammy was an accomplished bowler when she was younger and likes to sit down with her sons and daughters-in-law at holidays to play a hand or two of cards (poker, specifically).  Grammy has battled breast cancer and won!  As the family matriarch, she keeps everyone in the know about family news. 
She has a laid-back, positive, encouraging spirit and never misses an opportunity to offer praise for someone's accomplishment.  She likes to keep the peace and makes everyone feel at home.  Grammy's legacy is her large, fun-loving, pack of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren!

If you'd like to honor a woman in your life, write about her and link to the McLinky below!

Celebrating Mothers - Great Grandmothers

Welcome to Celebrating Mothers week at Quaint and Quirky!

All week long, I will be sharing about some of my female relatives.  Join in the fun by grabbing the badge, and adding your blog post link to the link list at the bottom of the post. 

Great Grandmothers

Beatrice

Beatrice was my maternal grandfather's mother.  She was definitely the most notorious of all my great-grandmothers.  She was born in Canada, but lived in the United States most of her life.  Her first husband died in the influenza outbreak of the 19-teens.  She was forced to put her children (she had two) in an orphanage.  My great-grandfather also lost his wife to the influenza outbreak and put his children (he had four) in an orphanage.  They met while visiting their children.  Six children is a large family by today's standards, yet they went on to have more children.  MANY more children.  The count is debated, but there were at least 17 children.  There could have been as many as 21.  My grandfather is the youngest of all of them.  She never learned to read or write in English, but she was a prayerful and devout woman who left a huge legacy.  At one point, she had several sons in World War II and she prayed for them each night.  They had many grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-children!

I am thankful to have her sewing machine as my "inheritance."  It was well-used and well-loved!

Sarah

Sarah was my paternal grandfather's mother.  By contrast to my last great-grandmother, she only had two children.  Here she is pictured with my grandfather.  People called her Sally instead of Sarah.  I called her Great Grammy.  She died when I was in my late teens.  When my grandparents babysat my brother and me, she would occasionally be there.  She was a tough cookie and my dad tells lots of stories about how tough she was.  She liked to tell me a story of how she won a watch at school when she was a young child. 

Rita

Rita was my maternal grandmother's mother.  I knew her the best, since she died when I was in my twenties and she lived close by.  I called her Memere.  Memere also had two children:  my grandmother and her sister.  Memere was a fraternal twin - her sister was named Alice. In this picture, Memere is on the right and Alic is on the left.  I guess this is also a picture of my great-GREAT- grandmother as well!

Memere was insistent on seeing me graduate from high school, so when rain limited the number of people I could invite to graduation, she went anyway.  

Memere worked in a factory, loved cats, cards, and baseball.  She never learned to drive, so she took the bus or walked everywhere - even well into her 80s.  She was spunky and feisty and was never afraid to speak her mind. We have lots of beautiful vintage Christmas ornaments that she handmade.  She definitely was proud of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren!

I don't know too much about my other great-grandmothers.  It's something that I should do more research and questioning on!  Time to talk to the grandparents!

Stay tuned tomorrow for my next installment!  

Add your blog link to my mclinky below!

It's a .....

First of all, we are so grateful to God that our baby seems to have all perfect little working parts.  We got to see the wiggles and the kicks and the four chambers of the heart. It was such a fascinating, relieving, and moving experience.

I love the blowing a kiss one!
After, we celebrated by buying our baby its first outfit.  We hadn't bought anything up to this point.  We were waiting until we learned the gender.
So we stopped at the baby gap........

And bought.....

A dress!  For our little GIRL! 
I was totally surprised - I really thought it was a boy!  The pictures were pretty clear though and the ultrasound tech was quite certain! 

She has a name, but that will be a birthday surprise!! 

Let the sewing commence!

Celebrate Mothers Week

I have a series of posts planned to celebrate the ladies in my family next week.  I'm going to write about one woman each day Monday through Saturday leading up to Mother's Day.  Won't you join me?

Details:
~You could write about your own mother, mother-in-law, grandmothers, aunts, or anyone who serves (or served) as a mother figure in your life.  Write a poem, a list of things you love about her, post a picture, do whatever you want to to honor her!
~I will set up a Mcklinky each day (a list of anyone participating) so we can easily visit other blogs and see the tributes to the mothers of other bloggers.  Once you have your post written, come here and add it to the list.
~You don't have to participate each day - write as many days or as few as you would like!
~ You can grab the blog badge up there to share on your blog and get more people involved.

Anyone interested?

Recent happenings

I feel like I have disappeared for a while around here.  I've been up to something.  Something fun and new!

A while back, I started taking photography courses at JessicaSprague.com.  I really enjoyed it and decided it could be something that I wanted to explore further.

I really really love taking pictures of people.  I like capturing their personalities and their attitudes.  I like capturing moments between parents and children, or kids and dogs, or siblings.

So, I decided to start a little photography business.

I will be a stay-at-home mom starting this summer, so earning some extra income will be helpful too! Click on the logo to take you to the website.  Or go  HERE. Check it out and let me know what you think!  I still need to add content and fix some pictures, but you can get the main idea! 

In other news, Wednesday we go for our anatomy scan appointment to find out the gender of the baby!  I promise there will be much more sewing going on after that! ;)

You All Were Right!

You smarties!  Thank you for all the congratulations!

Yes, we are having our first baby this September!  We are very excited!  We will find out the gender in about eight weeks, but we'll probably keep the name to ourselves (until he/she is born, of course!).  My husband has been busy reading "instruction manuals" as he calls them (a.k.a. parenting books).  We'd appreciate your prayers, if you would so oblige, for a healthy pregnancy and baby!  I'm sure this baby will be quirky, I wonder if it will be quaint as well!  ;)

Here is what my mom was looking at in the first picture that clued her in!

We got Levi to help a little bit! 

I've got some projects to add soon and I'm thinking about my next giveaway... hmmmm!

Can you guess?

Can you guess...

What I told...

my parents...

a few weeks ago?

You probably can! ;)

Mothers, Grandmothers, and Aunts

Today was our church's Mother's Day luncheon. It was exceptional, as always. The theme was "The measure of a woman." Our favors were measuring tapes (the kind for garments) and measuring spoons. The gentlemen of the church, sporting measuring tape suspenders did all the waiting on us!


The centerpieces were adorable - large Pyrex dishes filled with foam flowers. The center of each flower was a measuring spoon.


Here is the annual picture of the ladies of my family. This year, my mother-in-law was in warm and sunny Florida, so she did not attend. From left to right: Me, my mom, Gram, Grammy, and Auntie Paula. My aunt told us today that she's expecting her third child! My newest (and last) cousin will be due in December!

My mom and me:

Like my flower? It's my very first blog contest win! I won my friend Hillary's blog contest. I loooove this flower. The center of it is a vintage pin. Please visit her etsy shop to see her other creations!

Happy Mother's Day to all moms out there!

A capable, intelligent, and virtuous woman--who is he who can find her? She is far more precious than jewels and her value is far above rubies or pearls.

Proverbs 31:10

Sophie's Bag

I ended up making my baby cousin a bag for her birthday (surprise!). I'm going to make her an Oliver + S lazy days skirt too, but I ran out of time. I decided that if Sam got a train car plane bag, Sophie can get a girly ruffly bag for her stuff.
The pictures are weird because I forgot to take a picture before I gave it to her, so I had to take the pictures at my grandparents' house.A closeup of the ruffles. I love ending ruffles this way because you don't have to finish the ends!
The birthday girl herself. It's fun having a cousin who is one because it makes me younger. You can't be that old if your cousin is only one! She has cousins older than me too - one in his thirties with two children!

Happy Birthday to You and You and You

Do you ever have chunks of time where it seems every time you turn around, there's a birthday sneaking up on you? First grandmother, then cousin, then mom, then cousin, then uncle, uncle, cousin, cousin, grandparents anniversary, etc. Our late August through late September is quite like that. I've made some presents (some I forgot to photograph) and some more are waiting in the wings.... First, here's a non occasion present I sent to my mother-in-law in Virginia. I bound an address book text block with this K&Company silhouette paper.

She liked it!

Yesterday my little cousin turned three. His name is Sam and he looooooves cars, trucks, planes, trains, emergency vehicles, you name it.... He needed an appropriate bag for all the accessories a car/truck/plane/train lover possesses!

A magnetic snap closure for 3-year-old hands.
His sister turns one at the beginning of October. What should I make her? She likes water bottles and empty boxes and chews on dog bones. She's not a big fan of hair bows. She frequently gets stepped on and squeezed by aforementioned big brother without a peep. You might not know she's even in the house except she's so cute you just want to hold her all the time.
Hmmmm... that's a tough one. I'd better keep thinking!